Omedetou Gozaimasu!

Miu, Riko and their new sister, Kokoko. It's a regular Three Sisters' Story.

That's a nice "shutter chance."

Understanding Japan "Properly"

There are interesting ways to gain an understanding of a society through its language. Two words that speak to Japan's rule-oriented approach to behavior are the words chanto ("properly") and chanto shita ("proper"), which are used to grant a higher status to "the way things should be done." Once, when I went to pick up my daughter from school, I watched the teacher showing the kids a kami-shibai (a story told to kids using sheets of cardboard with pictures on them) about the proper way to brush your teeth, the proper way to greet others, and so on. Of course teaching kids is one thing, but it's interesting to note that the concept of there being "one" correct way to do things comes up in many situations. Almost without fail, those who don't do what's expected of them -- young people who drop out of school and play guitar in front of the train station, couples who live together without getting married, even crazy gaijin like me who quite their English teaching jobs to start companies selling wacky things from Japan to people around the world -- are seen in a negative light by society at large. Some examples of the word chanto in Japanese sentences are, chanto benkyo shite kudasai (Please study properly, as you should) or, kare wa chanto shita sarariiman desu (He is a respectable company employee).

New Image Hiding Feature on JBOX.com

We've been making more improvements around here, always finding ways to make your experience at J-List a better one. One question we've struggled with for some time was what to do about some of the items we sell on the JBOX.com site which feature, say, famous Japanese idols in bikinis. It's a hard question, since we don't want to group idols with wide appeal like Yuko Ogura on the "R" site only just because they're wearing a bikini, and yet some of those bikini shots can get pretty sexy. We think we've come up with a good solution that keeps some steamier PG items on the JBOX site without being a problem for people who surf the site at work. Now, all images of sexy bikini photobooks or calendars will be hidden but the first one, and if you want to see them, just click the "view images" button that's right there. Feedback on the new changes is always welcome!

Pregnant Woman Dies in Tokyo: Update

Japan is in a state of shock over the death of a pregnant mother after she was turned away from seven different hospitals. The woman was near her due date when she suddenly started complaining of a terrible headache and nausea. On the advice of the obstetrician the husband called an ambulance, but it took an hour and a half before a hospital finally agreed to take the patient. The baby was born via Caesarean section and is fine, but the mother unfortunately died several hours later of what was discovered to be a brain hemorrhage. The problem is lack of doctors, especially ones capable of handling an emergency patient about to give birth. As Japan's birthrate falls, more and more hospitals are readjusting their staff to better serve their existing patients, and all too often this means less attention paid to maternity medicine, which of course is a source of worry for any potential mothers. While this sad event happened in Tokyo, the problem is even worse in rural towns -- I once saw a documentary about a woman who had to drive herself two hours to the only maternity hospital in her area for her regular check-ups, and how nervous she was about what would happen if anything went wrong with her pregnancy with her so far from her doctor. It's an especially ironic tragedy coming just as Japan tries to take on its sagging rate of population growth, even creating a new cabinet post for Minister in Charge of the Declining Birth Rate headed by young politician and new mother Yuko Obuchi. Now all the talk shows are buzzing with experts giving their opinions on the problem, with slogans of "Don't let this woman's birth have been in vain."

(We do have some happy birth-related news for you, by the way. An hour ago, J-List's manga and photobook-meister Yasu's wife safely gave birth to their third daughter, as Yasu continues his plan to re-populate Japan single-handedly. The baby's name is Kokoro, and mother and daughter are doing fine.)

All babies look Japanese when they're born, don't they? Note: this isn't Yasu's baby.

All About Shinto

I recently talked about Buddhism and how many of Japan's customs are tied to the religion, sometimes without people being aware of it. For example, the traditional Bon-Odori dance done at Tanabata festivals in August was originally performed to welcome the spirits of the dead who were returning home for a visit, but no one seems aware of that these days. But Buddhism isn't the only religious tradition here -- there's also the original belief system, Shinto. The word means "Way of the Kami" or "Way of the Gods" and it finds spirits (kami) in things like mountains, trees, rivers, and for people who watch too much anime, magical fox gods who transform into pretty girls. You could probably make a strong argument that Totoro, a magical spirit who lives in the forest and which only children can see, comes from this tradition of worshipping nature and is thus a kami, but Japanese people might look at you funny if you did. Another aspect of Shinto is purification, and there are many rites related to making something (land you're about to build a house on, the sumo ring you're about to wrestle in) clean and pure. Some people even pay a Shinto priest to ogamu, or purify, a new car they've just purchased, so they'll have good luck and avoid accidents. Whenever I go in our out of the J-List office my eyes pass over the glass of water and plate of salt that my wife keeps by the door. This, too, is for purification purposes, to keep bad luck out of J-List and protect all of us inside.

Idioms in Japanese

We never think about idioms in our own language, but to non-native speakers, learning the meanings of phrases like "to leave no stone unturned" or "to stick your neck out for someone" is a real challenge. There are idioms in Japanese, too, including a whole sub-category that have to do with parts of the body. The phrase koshi ga hikui (lit. "one's lower back is low, near to the ground") means a person who is very humble and always apologizing, a good thing in the context of Japan, but shiri ga aoi ("one's rear end is blue") means they're too young or lack experience since babies born in Asia have a blue spot on their rear ends until the age of two or so. If someone can't keep a secret they are kuchi ga karui ("their mouth is too light"), but if they are kuchi ga umai ("their mouth is skilled") then they're good at making jokes or getting others to agree with them. The eyes in Japanese are called me (pronounced "meh"), and some idioms that make use of eyes include me ga takai (lit. "your eyes are high"), meaning someone with very high standards, and me ga ten ni natta ("my eyes became little black dots"), meaning, I was so surprised, my face looked like a character out of a manga.

Barber Shops and Baths

I love getting a haircut in Japan. The barber shop I use rents space inside a lobby of a large onsen/public bath, making it possible for me to get my hair cut and then jump right into the bath immediately, washing away all the unwanted hair from my head. The guy who cuts my hair is very interested in English, having been to the U.K. several times, and he always asks me for advice on how he can learn more effectively. My main advice to him is to be "8x" like a CD-ROM drive in a computer -- that is, to attack the problem of learning from as many different sides as possible. In my own case, I augmented my Japanese classes at college by watching anime, reading manga I was interested in, translating songs for friends and writing fan letters to my favorite manga artists. (Some even wrote back, so bowled over were they at receiving a letter from an American fan.) Finding aspects of Japan that you are interested in -- be it J-doramas, offbeat music, martial arts or what have you -- is a great way to make it easier to learn the language. My barber is always full of questions about America, asking me things like what barber shops are like there, or what my first impressions of Japan were, and we have many interesting discussions. Truth be told, I wish more of the Japanese people I met were more curious about the world outside Japan, asking questions like him -- all too often, it seems, I encounter people who don't really want to be inquisitive and learn new things.

Politics Compared: Japan and America

America's election is almost here, and the whole world is watching, including the Japanese, who get regular reports from the campaign trail on the news. It's interesting how politics differs in each country, with people taking sides on different issues in accordance with their own unique national history. Japan's system allows for several political parties, with the major ones being the ruling Liberal Democratic Party; the opposition Democratic Party of Japan; New Komeito, a party with ties to the Sokka Gakkai Buddhist religion, part of the current coalition; and the smaller Japan Communist and Socialist Parties. Perhaps due to this more complex political landscape, the idea of being "conservative" or "liberal" here is a little different from what you might be used to in your country. Conservatives like the ruling LDP are associated with being pro-business, pro-agriculture, since farmers make up so much of the party's base of voters, and pro-construction, as Japan loves to build things. Conservative politics often go hand-in-hand with respect for the Japanese Emperor, and at the extreme end ultra right-wingers embarrass everyone by driving around in loudspeaker trucks blaring war songs from World War II. (On the upside, they sometimes play the Space Battleship Yamato theme song, which is cool.) Things on the other side of the aisle are harder to pin down. "Liberals" in Japan would on the surface be tied to traditional socialist movements, although there's very little discussion of this in modern Japan; instead, the only "socialist" proposals you hear about are attempts to eliminate the 5% consumption tax to help households economically. Teachers in public schools are considered left-leaning and against the Emperor System, and when my wife was in Junior High she had a teacher who took time out from the normal curriculum to teach the students about the war, despite this not being in the approved textbooks. Different issues divide people at different times, for example there was a rousing debate on how to reform Japan's sprawling National Postal System (which also functions as the world's largest single bank in terms of deposits) a few years ago. North Korea's kidnapping of 13 Japanese citizens to serve as language teachers for North Korean spies has also left its mark on politics, and the Japan Socialist Party was never able to recover from being associated with North Korea in the past. Despite the push and pull of party politics in Japan, very little actually changes after an election, due to the layer of professional civil service employees (komuin) who actually do the work of government. The Minister of Education might change when an election is held and a new cabinet formed, but very few of the staff at the Ministry overall would be affected, which brings a kind of eternal stability to the country. Incidentally I've voted in the election via the absentee ballot system already. If you're in the U.S., hope you'll be voting, too!

This is what Japanese elections are like, but louder

Stereotypes and Japanese Salarymen

Stereotypes are not good since they cause us to make assumptions about people from other countries before we've gotten to know them. When I taught English as a Second Language, I used to do a lot of part-time work, going to people's homes to teach their kids once a week, and I was able to come into contact with a lot of people from average families trying to help their kids learn English to extremely wealthy students who seemed to think it was fashionable to have foreigners hanging around. One family I taught seemed to be a pretty average Japanese family on the surface: bustling mother overly concerned about her kids' education; bright daughter; younger son who loved Pokemon and "UFO Catcher" (crane game) machines; and a salaryman father who often worked late. The father surprised me one day by showing me pictures of his journey from Vladivostok to Moscow on the Siberian Railroad, which had been a lifelong dream of his, and I was immediately sorry I'd assumed he was such an average Joe. The leader of my daughter's Girl Scout troop is another such person. At first glance, she's an average middle-aged Japanese woman, worrying over how to make her daughter study more and tending a small dairy farm. Turns out, she's also a published author of children's books, and quite well-known in her field, which I never suspected, looking at her. I wonder if the Japanese I meet here have stereotyped ideas about what I'm like before they get to know me?

South Korea [Hearts] Japan

Today marks an interesting 10-year anniversary: the first legal performance of a Japanese song in South Korea, when singer Tomoe Sawa performed several classic Japanese melodies including Furusato (Home Town) in a concert in Kwangju. Ever since the end of World War II, South Korea maintained an official ban on "cultural imports" from Japan, allowing no Japanese music, no Japanese-language manga or animation, and no films to be distributed inside their country as a way of protecting themselves from the strong influence of their island neighbor and former enemy. (I'm told that a healthy black market for JPOP and anime products always existed, if you knew where to look.). The government-approved performance was the beginning of a major shift in relations between the two countries, allowing many new kinds of trade to flow across the Sea of Japan (a name the Koreans hate, by the way). The result has been a renaissance of cultural exchange resulting in a flood of everything from popular South Korean Dramas to films to Winter Sonata-themed pachinko machines here, while Japanese singers like Gackt and many dramas and films have become popular in South Korea. Tourism between the two nations has blossomed, too, as Japanese feel more welcome in South Korea and vice-versa. Being an outsider to both countries, I'm aware of how inadequate my overall understanding of the Japan-Korea relationship is. I do know, however, that the old slogan of "world peace through shared popular culture" is totally true, and just as Japan's international standing has been raised by people around the world embracing its culture as their own, South Korea has a lot to gain by opening up and sharing with Japan.

All About Buddhism and Greco-Japanese Art

Like most questions related to Japan, religion is complex and interesting. The major religion of Japan is Buddhism, distributed among dozens of sects like Nichiren and Shingon and Tendaishu, although it's frankly all Greek to me (see below). Although around 70% of Japanese describe themselves as Buddhist, it's hard to separate the religion from the overall culture of Japan, since so many aspects of life here (like not sticking your chopsticks up in your rice, or not sleeping with your head pointing north) flow unconsciously from the religion. I arrived in Japan in 1991 knowing nothing about Buddhism, and I still know nothing in 2008, although I've enjoyed observing everything around me, even if I didn't always understand what I was seeing. One surprise I had in store for me was that Buddhism in Japan doesn't seem to have much to do with trying to achieve Enlightenment through fasting or denying yourself worldly pleasures -- truth be told, most Buddhist priests I've known owned really expensive Mercedes Benz cars. No, Buddhism here is all about remembering and loving your ancestors, and over the course of a year there are many events related to making those who have died before you know they're not forgotten. Another surprise I got happened during my first visit to Nara, the capital 1200 years ago. Outside Todaiji Temple there are two giant statues of Buddhist guardian deities -- manifestations of the Bodhisattva Vajrapani, or something like that -- which looked to my eyes like something out of Ancient Greece. And indeed, the Nio figures are good examples of the Greco-Buddhist artistic tradition, which made it all the way to Japan. Amazing!

Amuro, the Nature Documentary Narrator

The other day my son and I were watching an NHK documentary on penguins and elephant seals living on King George's Island, near the South Pole. We were interested in the show because of the beautiful and mysterious creatures they were showing us, but also because the narrator was Tohru Furuya, perhaps the most famous anime voice actor in Japan today, who provided the voices of Amuro Ray from the Mobile Suit Gundam universe, Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon, Kyosuke from Orange Road, and about a bazillion other roles over the years. My son and I (who like Gundam way too much) made a great game of spitting out Gundam-esque lines and laughing as "Amuro" replied with fascinating information on the mating rituals of the wildlife on the island. In many ways, anime is everywhere in Japan, and there's no a person under the age of 45 here that can't wax a little nostalgic about some anime they watched as a youngling, even if they're not an active otaku today. That's part of the fun of being an anime fan -- it means there's the potential for an unexpected connection with any Japanese person you meet, even when you least expect it.

By the way, if you're a Gundam fan, hunt down the Zeta Gundam compilation movies. They're quite cool, since you can watch the entire Zeta Gundam series (truly the Empire Strikes Bath of the Gundamverse) in a short time. The altered character designs are hard to get used to, though. Cool, but switching back and forth is a little funky.

The Three Stages of Gaijin Eye Aversion

My wife came into my office the other day holding the latest copy of Newsweek (the Japanese version) that contained some interesting article she'd just read. "Did you know the secret rule of gaijin in Japan? When they see another foreigner on the train, they avert their eyes!" Of course after living here for so long, I was well aware of the strange tendency for foreigners to avoid making eye contact with another foreigners they see on the street, be they from Europe, the U.S. or Brazil, and I've even done it myself. It's a strange phenomenon indeed, which I've come to think of as the Three States of Eye Aversion. First, a foreigner who has moved to Japan is enjoying himself and getting used to living in a country in which 98% of the people identify with the same ethnic group, which feels a bit strange for a while. Then along comes some Sri Lankan guy on his way to Tokyo, making you re-think your neat little world view of Japan, so you do your best to ignore him. You realize it's silly to ignore someone for a silly reason like that, though, so you decide to go talk to him, but you then find out that not everyone from Sri Lanka speaks English, so you embarrass yourself terribly. Finally, you decide to keep your eyes to yourself the next time you see a foreigner on the train, which makes for a simpler Japan Experience anyway. Incidentally, I don't think the odd eye aversion thing applies to tourists or anyone visiting Japan for a short time, so you never need to worry about running into unfriendly people here; this odd custom only affects foreigners living in Japan on an extended basis.

Then there are the times when you avert your eyes for other reasons...

Japanese Sound Words, and Underwear Fanservice Anime?

Would you like to learn to speak Japanese fluently? If so then you want to become pera pera, an odd but fun Japanese onomatopoeic word that means "able to speak a foreign language very well." After a trip to the beach, don't you hate the feeling of sand in your shoes? That's zara zara, which every Japanese immediately recognizes as the gritty sound of sand. Then there's one you hear in anime quite a lot, doki doki, the "sound" of a nervous person's heart racing, perhaps as they prepare to confess their love to someone special. While there's a whole class of "normal" onomatopoeia that mimic actual sounds like cats and dogs (nyan nyan and wan wan, in case you were curious), the Japanese take these concepts a step further by creating highly descriptive sounds for abstract ideas as well, and because they're so unlike anything we have in English, it's fun for students to learn about them. Something that's brand sparkling new is described as pika pika, while old and run-down is boro boro. If you work fast and efficiently (bishi bishi), your boss might give you a bonus, but if you're slow and lazy (dara dara) he or she might fire you. Eating quickly is known as paku paku, which is where the famous video game character got his name from, while the useful phrase giri giri means "barely," as in barely arriving on time, barely having enough money to buy something, or (in some situations) barely having clothes on. Then there's suu suu, which describes feeling especially drafty: in the classic episode of Strike Witches, the anime about World War II-era magical girls who wear mecha to fight powerful alien enemy, there's an episode where the playful Italian Francesca Lucchini makes off with Yoshika Miyafuji's underwear, forcing her to prepare for battle without her skivvies on. Poor Yoshika complained loudly using this colorful phrase ("suu suu suru!").

A Few of my Favorirte Japanese Foods

sushi, sashimi, and udon or soba when you think of food in Japan, people here have an incredibly rich and varied diet, with popular Chinese and Italian and Indian dishes, American favorites like "Hamburg Steak" (a large steak made of hamburger meat, which Japanese assume we eat every day in the U.S.), and so on. A lot of the foods I really like now are ones I hadn't even known existed before I came to live here. One of my all-time favorite meals is katsu, a cutlet of pork or chicken that's fried and eaten with rice and that heavenly sauce, and it's one of the dishes the J-List prefecture of Gunma is famous for. Then there's Chicken and Egg Soboro, perhaps my favoritest food ever. It's basically teriyaki chicken, flavored ground beef and scrambled egg eaten over steaming rice, and I always have to fight with my kids for seconds when we have it at my house.

Sitting on the Floor in Japan

One of the minor challenges for a foreigner living in Japan is getting used to sitting on the floor a lot. While Western-style furniture like comfortable sofas and chairs can be found everywhere here, it's common for most houses to also have one or more washitsu (Japanese rooms) complete with tatami mats and little cushions to sit on called called zabuton (literally, sitting futon). In my house, we often eat with my wife's parents, with everyone sitting around the kotatsu, a low table with a heater inside for keeping warm in the winter, while everyone grabs from a large pot of food boiling away in the center. Even after living for so long in Japan, an hour or so of sitting on the floor like this starts to get uncomfortable, and I'll usually switch to a nearby chair when no one is looking. I remember when I met my future mother-in-law for the first time: she took me out to experience a really traditional Japanese tea ceremony, which requires that you sit in seiza ("correct sitting") position with your entire body's weight resting on your knees and feet for about 10,000 hours. Japanese always expect that foreigners won't be able to sit for long in that position, so of course I had to summon up every ounce of will I had in me and endure my legs falling asleep without complaint. I guess I made a good impression since she let me marry her daughter.

Do you know the Sino-Japanese numeric system, man?

The Arabic number system used in the West is based on 1,000, but the kanji-derived number system used in Japan uses 10,000 as its central numerical unit, a concept that takes a while to get used to. Basically, if you want to buy something that costs 10,000 yen, you need to think of it as ichi mahn en, or one "ten thousand." Want to pick up a laptop that goes for 100,000 yen? It'll be juu mahn en, or ten "ten thousands" of yen, while a car that costs a million yen is hyaku mahn en or one hundred "ten thousands." The conversation is not only a chore to do on the fly, it's a huge source of potential translation errors, since your brain latches onto the first number it hears like "ten" and immediately assumes a value of 10,000, when it's really 100,000. The mahn character comes up in many other words, too, making it an interesting oddity for students of the language. For example, the character can be found in the word for fountain pen, man'nen hitsu, literally a pen you can write with for 10,000 years; a number of ancient proverbs in both Japanese and Chinese, like "cranes live for 1000 years, turtles live for 10,000 years"; and in the famous battle cry banzai! which is written with characters that mean "to live for 10,000 years." The name for the Great Wall of China in Japanese uses the character, too: Banri no Chojo, or the Long Castle of 10,000 Leagues. Because the character for 10,000 is accurately transliterated as man, it's common for foreigners to sometimes pronounce it like the word "man" in English, when it should be said like mahn, with a long vowel. Little problems like this are one reason I recommend that anyone interested in studying the language avoid texts that use Romanized Japanese but instead force you to read in hiragana and katakana right from the beginning, like many of the items we offer. Besides giving you a quick start at being literate, your pronunciation and accent will be much improved by not having to un-learn the brain's natural tendency to apply the pronunciation rules of English to other languages.

Confusing Ideas about Japan: Nihonjinron

One concept you eventually bump into when studying about Japan is nihonjinron (nee-HONE-JEEN-rone), a word which literally means "theories on Japan." A collection of ideas that grew out of the Meiji Period, the nihonjinron concepts generally have to do with describing Japan as a completely unique country, unlike the nations of Asia or the West, with a linguistic and developmental history unlike that of any other nation. Part of this is the belief, held by almost all Japanese, that their language is one of the most difficult in the world, with its mixture of Japanese words and grammar overlaid by Chinese characters with readings that shift by context and region, all complicated by heavy borrowing of foreign loan words. Another part of the reason Japanese is so hard, supposedly, is that it's so subtle, with so many shades of grey and information that's implied rather than being specifically stated, which no one but a Japanese could ever really comprehend. Although some of the nihonjinron ideas can be interesting to contemplate, there's a high amount of voodoo in them. Besides, Japanese ESL student know that English is the hardest language in the world to learn...

Trick Your Mind into Learning Japanese

Part of mastering a foreign language involves coming up with strategies that help you trick your brain into learning. In my own case, I figured out early on that I learned better if I made word associations, allowing me to tie a word like kurai (dark) to the similar-sounding English word "cry" using the sentence "cry in the dark," or combining shinu (to die) with the English words "she knew," creating "she knew he was going to die." These word associations can get quite silly, but when you make a connection this way you'll probably have it forever, so they can be useful tools. My kids are preparing for the Eiken test this weekend, which is the primary test of English in Japan, and to help out we've tried to come up with innovative ways for them to learn. My daughter has trouble sitting still for a long time, so we do short lessons with lots of breaks in between. Also, when reading through word problems, she's allowed to change the subject of any sentence so that it talks about one of her family members, making it more fun for her to get through, like Mad Libs. In the case of my son, I help him memorize vocabulary words by coming up with lines from the Star Wars films, when I can. For example, one word he wasn't getting was "contamination," so I turned on my C-3P0 voice and spat out the Episode IV line, "I've got such a bad case of dust contamination I can barely move." It was just the mental hook he needed.

"It's Me!" Scam Update

Japan continues to have problems with a type of fraud known as furikome sagi (translatable as "Transfer the Money Now!" Fraud) in which someone of dubious character calls an elderly person up and pretends to be their grandson, suddenly in need of money to pay back a loan to a yakuza gangster, or tells them that a family member has committed some wrongdoing and will get into trouble unless money is transferred to the following account immediately. One enterprising fraudster even posed as an agent for the National Tax Agency on the phone, carefully walking an elderly victim through the steps needed to transfer her life savings to them under the guise of helping her pay her taxes. The National Police Agency has declared October to be "Elimination of Bank Fraud Month" and has assigned 60,000 officers to stand guard at banks and talk to elderly customers that come in to make sure they're not being swindled. Japanese "cash corners" (as ATMs are sometimes called) have been updated to display messages warning against the dangers of bank fraud, too. The new measures seem to be helping somewhat, although 16 of the 94 reported bank fraud cases so far this month happened right under the noses of police officers standing guard, including a poor elderly woman who was fooled into transferring $28,000 to an unknown bank account. Japan is a very conservative society when it comes to saving, and seniors on average have $200,000 in cash, twice the $100,000 the average household has saved, which is still a huge amount.

On Accents and Fake Mexican Food

You've been in Japan too long when you get a nihongo ga jozu and feel really insulted. It's an odd fact of life in Japan, but foreigners who are learning Japanese strive for that magic moment when people will stop complimenting them on how good their Japanese is. Being told "your Japanese is very good" (nihongo ga jozu) is a sign that your language ability is good, but not "there" yet -- if it were really good, the person you're conversing with would just shut up and talk to you like a normal person. After studying Japanese for four years at SDSU and living in Japan since 1991, I am hopefully as fluent as I will ever need to be, although there are still occasional difficulties like discussing specific subject areas. Once I went to KFC to order a Twister (if you put taco sauce on them it's almost like you're eating Mexican food), but for some reason, I couldn't make myself understood by the girl taking my order. It turned out that she was a foreigner herself, a university student from China, and hadn't understood my American Japanese accent.

Career Women vs Office Ladies

I talked last time about how some work-related terms like "office lady" (OL) and "career woman" are used to differentiate certain full-time workers based on their status in the company, and how this seemed odd to me. This is part of a system created in the 1990s as Japan realized it wasn't very good at that whole male-female equality thing. The way it works is this: when an employee joins a (largeish) company, they usually have the option of choosing which career path they want to be on, either doing general but important tasks in the company, or opting for more challenging work that offers increased responsibility and possibility for advancement. For example, at the bank we use at J-List, there are two types of staff: ippan or "general" employees who work as tellers and wear these cute little bank teller uniforms, and sogo or "regular" employees (yes, I know general and regular sound like the same thing), who do more important jobs like manage other workers, handle currency exchanges and go out and find new business for the bank. Since both male and female employees are free to opt for either type of work without discrimination, it seems like a good system, although in practice I'm not sure how much real effect it has promoting equality when both sexes are pretty happy with things the way they are. When my wife started working for a Japanese company back in the late 80s she was eager to acquire new skills, but all she was called upon to do was memorize which green tea cup belonged to which male employee and how they liked their tea, which she hated. She wishes they had the current system in place back then.

National Mythology of Japan

A nation is defined by several factors, including language, geography and politics, but also by its shared mythology. In America we grow up with stories of George Washington telling his father "I cannot tell a lie" when asked about the cherry tree, or Paul Revere famously shouting, "The British are coming!" which give us a warm and fuzzy patriotic feeling. We (hopefully) realize later in life that a lot of these events didn't actually take place, but are embellishments after the fact that have nevertheless become part of our culture. I've always enjoyed observing the Japanese version of this mechanism and see how its national folk heroes are made. In 1594 a ninja known as Goemon Ishikawa tried to assassinate Hideyoshi Toyotomi, the Japanese ruler who's interesting because he started out as a peasant yet became the most powerful man in the country. The attack failed, and when Goemon was publicly executed by being boiled alive in a pot he became a kind of national hero to the country. (Goemon from Lupin III is his descendant.) The feudal lord of the Mito region during the early Edo Period became an unlikely folk hero when a book called The Record of the Wanderings of Mito Komon was published, making the fictional adventures of the kindly old samurai who flashed the official mark of the Tokugawa clan to shame evil-doers as famous as Buffalo Bill and Billy the Kid. And then there's one of the most respected names in Japanese history, Ryoma Sakamoto, who almost single-handedly came up with a plan to force the Tokugawa Shogunate to surrender power after an nearly bloodless conflict, which led to the establishment of Japan as a modern nation. His adventures have been written about and embellished so much that many apocryphal stories are believed to be real.

Strange English in Japan

The Japanese use a lot of English, but it's not always easy for gaijin to figure out what's being said. "Punk" doesn't mean a tough-looking guy, but a flat tire (it comes from the word puncture). If someone is "cunning" in Japan, it means they're cheating on a test. For some reason, the English word "glamor" has come to mean women who are well-endowed, so you might want to use the Japanese word for grammar (bunpo) to avoid chuckles in your classroom. If you buy a "bike" for your child you might get looked at funny since the word always refers to a motorcycle and never to a bicycle. If you have a business proposal to make to a Japanese woman, there's a slight chance she'll start blushing on you, since the English word "propose" is only used for marriage proposals in Japan, not for other kinds of formal business suggestions. If you "rinse" your hair, you're applying cream rinse, and if you live in a "mansion" it means you live in a nice townhouse that you own yourself. Living in Japan can be wacky!

This is a mansion by the way. Lots of people live there.

Wither the Salaryman?

The word "salaryman" is a wasei-eigo (lit. "made-in-Japan English") term referring to a salaried male employee of a company. The word came into use in the Taisho Period (1912-1926) to describe the new professional class of company employees doing jobs we'd think of as "white collar," and during Japan's period of rapid economic growth in the postwar years these salarymen were responsible for Japan's economic miracle. The trademark of the salaryman is his conservative dark suit, called a sebiro in Japanese, which probably came from the English word "civil" since they are civilian clothes, i.e. not a military uniform. Although the salaryman is still the basis on which Japan's modern economic society is built, there are an increasing number of people turning on their backs on working full-time in a monolithic company, whether it's young people who choose to live as freeters, never tying themselves to one job for long, or men who escape their status as salarymen (known as datsu-sara), quitting their jobs to open a restaurant or a Japanese inn or go into business for themselves. The word salaryman describes male employees; female employees would likely be called "office ladies" (OLs) if they're doing standard clerical work, or "career woman" if they've made a choice to pursue their careers, which puts them in a different career track than normal OLs. Personally, I can't get past the fact that labels are used in such an overt way in Japan, the ultimate land of subtlety, where in the "always say exactly what you're thinking" U.S. it would be much more common for a more general term to be used for all employees.

Gaijin and Real Ramen

One thing foreigners visiting Japan should be sure and try is "real" ramen. Thanks to its cheapness, virtually everyone in the world is familiar with instant ramen noodles like Cup Noodle, and I sure ate my share during my days as a poor college student. The difference between instant noodles and the real stuff found in Japanese ramen restaurants, though, is like night and day. Although you might think of ramen is being a Japanese dish, it originated in China around the start of the 20th century, and within Japan ramen is considered Chinese food, on par with gyoza dumplings and spring rolls. (They even write the name for it in katakana, as it's a foreign loan word.) Ramen comes in one of several basic soup flavors, with the most common being shoyu (soy sauce), followed by miso (my own favorite), shio ("salt" flavor), and so on. I love ramen now, but it took me a few months to work up the courage to try many different kinds of the noodles when I first got here -- I was bowled over by the naked variety of ingredients, many of which I couldn't identify, that it took time for me to take it all in. Although you can probably find a ramen shop within twenty meters of you at all times in Japan, I recommend you try a yatai, or outdoor ramen stand, which is a wonderful icon of Tokyo; it's fun to talk with the Master while you eat. If you fancy yourself a ramen fan, plan on visiting the Yokohama Ramen Museum next time you're in town. Besides various displays on the history of the noodles, you can wander a perfect recreation of a 1958 Tokyo street and dig your chopsticks into the noodles of a bygone era.

Would you like pickled bamboo shoots with that?

Cuteness in the Bath, and Everywhere!

While most people in the U.S. probably opt for a shower to get clean, in Japan hopping in the furo (bath) is the norm, a nice custom that gives you time to relax after a hard day, although it does mean you need to wash your bathtub every other day or so. (Japanese baths come with heating units to allow water to be re-heated and used the next day, which is possible because you always wash yourself outside of the bath, keeping the water ostensibly clean.) This unpleasant task usually falls to me, since my kids are masters at disappearing the moment I go to ask them to do it. The other day I went shopping for various things for the home, including a new bath sponge, and I was surprised to see that the universal concept of kawaii (cute) was alive and well even in such mundane industries as cleaning supplies. Looking at the sponges the store offered for sale, I saw one that had a cute happy face that smiled back at me, so of course that was the one I reached for. Incidentally, J-List has many cute things in stock for you, including cute items for your bath, in our Wacky Things from Japan section.

My Wife's Uncle, the World War II Survivor

Yesterday we went to visit my wife's uncle in the hospital. Making a hospital visit to a sick friend or family member is quite an involved custom, called omimai (oh-me-my!), not to be confused with omiai (oh-me-eye!) which is formal meeting with a prospective marriage partner usually arranged by your parents. This is the guy who fought in World War II, and he just loves me since I'm the only one who listens attentively to his recollections of the war. I don't mind at all: it's great to be able to talk with someone who lived through such vibrant history during a time when our two countries were bitter enemies, and I gladly listened for an hour as he talked about his years manning the large guns on the Battleship Ise, a mammoth vessel that was retrofitted after Midway so that the back end could serve as a carrier. (Being an anime fan, I had to convert the scenes he described into proper Yamato vs Galimas space battles.) During the war, he escaped death no less than three times. The first was when an American bullet grazed his face, leaving a long scar. Then, his ship was to have been sent out with the Yamato on her final one-way mission, but there was no fuel so they got to stay at the shipyards at Kure. Finally, after the atomic bombing of nearby Hiroshima, the captain picked eight crew members out of a line to go to the city and see what had happened, and all eight men ended up dying of radiation poisoning. My wife's uncle had been the tenth man in that line.

Interesting Observations by Children and Linguistic Children

One thing that's fun about having kids is all the creative observations they make. Like the time my daughter saw a toy German airplane from World War II I had at home and proclaimed, "This airplane looks angry," because the Luftwaffe insignia looked like the "anger mark" seen so often in anime and manga. Or the time my family went to stay with a friend in Malaysia, and my daughter wondered why the (normal) maids that worked at our friend's house weren't wearing extremely kawaii uniforms like the ones she'd seen on Japanese TV. Then there was the time my son made a mistake in English, so he shrugged and said, "My name is stupid English," making a joke on that most elementary of ESL phrases. But you don't need to be a kid to be creative: just start learning a foreign language like Japanese. The natural period of exploration you'll go through as you engage in silly wordplay games in order to discover the boundaries of the language will have you coming up with the most expressive and inspired observations in no time, just like children do. This "linguistic childhood" effect also can also serve as a defense when your wife wants to know you're still geeking out over episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam at your age. Since I started learning Japanese in college in 1987, linguistically I'm only 21 years old!

The 1000th Anniversary of The Tale of Genji

2008 marks a special event: the 1000th anniversary of the completion of The Tale of Genji, the famous story penned by a woman known as Murasaki Shikubu, who was born in the year 973. Often called the world's first novel, the book was written in installments which were delivered to the ladies of the Imperial Court, with each chapter developing the 400+ characters in new ways, essentially making it the first Japanese soap opera. It's the tale of a fictional Japanese Emperor named Hikaru Genji ("Shining Genji") who was quite the playboy, and the first part of the story is largely concerned with the many noble women who loved him or who were loved by him. Just as students in English classes must schlep through Beowulf, Chaucer and Shakespere, which they usually hate at the time but hopefully come to appreciate later, all students here have to tackle Genji, although it's difficult because the Old Japanese the story was written in is so different from the modern language. The novel was written at the height of the Heian Period (794-1192), a kind of Golden Age when cultural influences from China and Korea enabled a level of peace and civilization hitherto unknown, before Japan came to be dominated by samurai warriors who warred for control of the country. To commemorate the millennium anniversary of the Tale of Genji, there are special museum displays going on throughout the country including one in Yokohama this month. The Japanese Post Office has gotten into the game, too, issuing a set of commemorative stamps for collectors.

Do Foreigners Freak Out Japanese People?

I was recently asked "Are Japanese afraid of gaijin?" It was an interesting question which I had to think on a bit before responding. Certainly the answer is no -- although Westerners are sometimes viewed as mysterious and confusing creatures by the locals, I wouldn't say anyone feels actual fear, except possibly for small children who might hide in their mother's skirts when a big foreigner comes lumbering up to say hello. Of course, foreigners here do perplex the Japanese around them on a regular basis with some of the strange things they do, whether it's leaving a box of laserdiscs out in the rain then taking them back to the store the next day as defective (as a friend of mine did once), using a mimikaki ear cleaner as a coffee stir, or squealing with delight at the most mundane sights and sounds of the country, like my unending fascination with Japanese railroad crossings. Of course, there are times when Japanese are freaked out by foreigners for good reason, like when a British tourist from Spain decided it would be a good idea to take his clothes off and go for a swim in the moat around the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, after he'd accidentally dropped a bag he was carrying in the water. It took the Japanese two hours to finally corner and arrest him.
Here are some pics. Hope you're not eating now ^_^ Who thinks this guy deserves to be made into an Internet meme?

Tama the Feline Stationmaster

You never know what's going to become popular in Japan next. It could be a new variation on the Maid Cafe concept like the Code Geass Cafe in Akihabara, where all the employees dress as characters from the anime series, or the "Morning Banana Diet" craze that supposedly has people buying up all the bananas in Japanese supermarkets right now. In Okayama Prefecture, a cat named Tama has been made honorary stationmaster of Kishi Station, which has created a huge spike in popularity for the region as tourists flock to see the cat of the hour and buy his official cat photobook. Kishi Station is located in an area so rural that it's been reconfigured as an unmanned station, with no permanent staff working there. Tama is owned by a man who runs a kiosk outside the station, and the cat became such a local icon that the train line decided to name him official stationmaster and buy him a little hat to wear. The popularity of the cat has been credited with bringing millions of yen to the entire prefecture in the form of increased tourist revenue, and the rail company has offered Tama all the cat food he can eat to show their thanks. I can has lifetime employment?

Japan Universities vs. U.S.: Which are Better?

Japan is a great place with a lot to offer many people, whether you're interested in learning the language, making good friends or just surfing the weirdness (of which there is plenty). One area where I feel America beats Japan handily its university system, which provides an incredibly rich array of options for anyone wanting to broaden their horizons. I've got a friend who worked for a major computer company doing a job that was not terribly fulfilling for him (I believe "soul crushing" were his exact words). When he was laid off a couple of years ago, he decided to make a big change by going back to school and getting an art degree. Although Japan's competitive university system does do some good by helping students set goals for themselves early on, one downside is that almost no one has a hope of getting into a major university unless they're near the age of 18 and are very focused on their studies -- going back to school in your thirties or forties is almost unthinkable. Japanese universities are inflexible in other ways, for example each major is generally walled off from the others, with little ability for students to experience a broad range of subjects. If you're a poly sci major and decided you want to switch to education, you're going to have to start your entire college career over from scratch, rather than being able to change majors and keep most of your units. Back during my time at SDSU (affectionately called "Suds University" by students because of all the beer we drank), students deciding they wanted to change majors was a regular occurrence, and even encouraged by the school, since the whole point of a university is to help students find their way.

Narrow Roads and Japan

You've been in Japan to long when, while driving on a two-lane road, you know the lane nearest the curb is going to be used as a parking lot. Since Japan has a lot less land area than the U.S., cramming four times the population of California into a space that's slightly smaller, allowances for the lack of space have to be made, and on most streets you can expect to see cars pulling over along the side of the road so people can run into the conbini (convenience store) and buy milk. There are always two or three cars in front of my parents' liquor shop on Sundays, too, since that the day Shonen Jump comes out. In all my years of driving in the U.S. I've never been on a road that was so narrow that two cars couldn't pass side-by-side, but it's not difficult to find roads like that in the more rural parts of Japan, and one of the skills you need when driving on such roads is the ability to back up until you can find a wider spot for the oncoming car to pass. Since there are many blind corners on narrower Japanese streets, there are curved mirrors posted to help you see oncoming cars or pedestrians, although learning to drive while being aware of these mirrors is quite a challenge -- they just don't enter my vision at all.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea is the latest film by Hayao Miyazaki, and it's been quite an event here in Japan. It's the story of a curious fish named Brunhilde who decides to sneak away from her father and sisters and see what's on the surface. There she's befriended by a human boy named Sosuke who names her Ponyo, and the two become fast friends. Because Ponyo licked a cut Sosuke had, she acquired the magical ability to assume human form, and she makes up her mind to leave the sea and live with her friend forever. It's a simpler film than Miyazaki-sensei has made in the past, closer to My Neighbor Totoro or Kiki's Delivery Service than to more plot-driven action films like Laputa. Just as his famous character Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was based on a character from Homer's Odyssey and a Japanese folk story of a princess who loved insects, Ponyo is a fusion of multiple sources, namely The Little Mermaid with its core elements rearranged; the local version of mermaids, as drawn in a famous woodblock printing from the Edo Period; a reverse version of Urashima Taro, the tale of a Japanese fisherman who visits a magical undersea palace; Little One-Inch, the story of a tiny child who goes to live with a Japanese couple, eventually attaining full size after many adventures; and The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, about a child who emerges from a bamboo stump who turns out to be the Moon Princess. (This last tale is, I am certain, the basis for E.T. as well,) As is usually the case with Miyazaki's films, there's always one song that you can't get out of your head, and the Ponyo theme (iTunes link) has been the most popular song in Japan for months. Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo...sakana no ko...

My Family the Anime Family

Sometimes I think my family would make the basis for an interesting anime series, along the lines of Darling wa Gaikokujin, a comic about a Japanese woman who thinks she's found the "perfect" American husband but is surprised when things don't always go as she expects. In the tradition of Sailor Moon and Magical DoReMi, my daughter would be the main character since she's quite occhokochoi (oh-cho-ko-choi), translatable as "clumsy in a cute way," always needing help from everyone else. Her brother would be a glasses-wearing egghead, constantly pointing out her faults, which is what he does already; you could make a lot of good tsukkomi and boke jokes based on his over-analytical nature when it comes to English, compared with her tendency to use English words freely without actually knowing what they mean. I think I'd make a pretty cool "Pops" type father character, a good-hearted but sometimes bumbling American who is an otaku for Japanese hot springs and who sometimes knows things that Japanese have no idea about. Having my wife as the president of their company (since my wife is president of J-List) would create some humorous situations, too -- the wife could try to pull rank on her husband at home -- while providing an updated vision of women for Japanese children to see. So if you have any contacts at a major animation studio in Japan, please send them my way!

Fires and Firemen in Old Edo

When you think of traditional images from the Edo Period, firemen probably don't immediately spring to mind. And yet for centuries, the brigades of hikeshi, lit. "those who put out fires," have been extremely important in keeping Japan's cities from going up in flames on a regular basis. Although we might think of Japan as being a backward nation during its 250-year period of sakoku ("chained country"), when it was death for any Japanese to leave Japan or for any foreigner to visit, the sprawling metropolis of Edo (now Tokyo) was actually the largest city in the world, with as many as 1.25 million residents at the time of the national census of 1720, compared with 860,000 in London. With so many people living in buildings made of wood, bamboo and paper, fires were a constant danger, and so teams of firemen wearing thick, multi-layered kimonos of cotton and special sandals were organized to keep them under control. Since there were no water pumps back then, the main way they accomplished this was by tearing down houses that weren't burning yet in order to isolate fires to a single part of the city. These heroic men were celebrated with a special genre of the ukiyoe art, which you can see by viewing the 2009 calendar we've posted to the site today.

There's a famous story related to fires in the Edo period, the tale of a girl named Oshichi, who became the most famous arsonist in Japanese history. She was born in the year 1666 in present-day Chiba Prefecture, and was adopted by a family who sold vegetables in Edo. When she was 16, a fire burned through much of the city, and she was forced to evacuate with her adopted family. While fleeing the flames, she met a page from a Buddhist temple named Shonosuke and they fell madly in love with each other. After she returned home, she found herself thinking of the young man endlessly, and her obsession became so great that she decided to start another fire in they city, so that she might be able to see her lover again. She was caught and executed, but her story became a legend in a Guy Fawkes sort of way, and has been used as the basis for traditional Kabuki plays for centuries. Oshichi was the first Hinoeuma (hi-no-EU-ma) or "Fire Horse," the beginning of the superstition that girls born in the Year of the Horse every 60 years will grow up to be headstrong and will cause sadness for their family. The last Hinoeuma year was 1966, and so many women avoided having children that year that it caused a noticeable drop in Japanese population numbers.

A manga version of Oshichi, and her grave, quite a tourist spot today

Japanese Food Gifts

The Japanese, they take their gift-giving seriously, a fact that I was reminded of while in Tokyo yesterday. I was passing through Ueno Station, one of my favorite parts of the city, and I saw an interesting shop selling omiyage (oh-mee-YAH-gay, souvenirs) of Tokyo, with the interesting name of Gift Island. They offered all manner of exotic sweets for sale, from the famous Tokyo Banana (banana-shaped cakes) to Goma Tamago (a traditional manju cake shaped like an egg and made with black sesame seeds, supposedly very healthy) to the fabulous castella, a cake rich in eggs that was introduced by the Dutch in the 16th century. One of my favorite traditional treats is called dora-yaki, which looks to the Western eye to be two pancakes with sweet Japanese beans inside; this is the favorite food of Doraemon the time-traveling robot cat, by the way. Of course, J-List has recently started carrying some interesting gift boxes of souvenir snacks you normally can only buy in places like Akihabara or Asakusa, with packages that are specially designed to be suitable for giving to others as gifts, or you can munch them yourself. Check them out on the site!

It looks like a Twinkie, but it's Tokyo Banana, so it's much cooler ^_^

October 1st -- Time To Change Your Uniform

Do you that rustling noise? It's the sound of millions of Japanese students, mostly in junior high and high school, changing from their summer to their winter uniforms. Today is the day for koromo-gae (koh-roh-moh GA-eh), meaning "seasonal changing of clothes," when Japanese students will switch from their light uniforms for summer to their heavier uniforms for winter, which they all do on the same day, from Kyushu to Hokkaido. (Okinawa, being extra warm, gets to wear their summer uniforms for two months longer than the rest of the country.) Of course, the weather doesn't always get the memo, and at the end of September it got really cold in Japan, forcing my son to go to school shivering in his summer uniform...and of course, now that the uniform change has come, it's gotten really warm again, so he'll be sweating. Like many aspects of Japan there's more to the clothes-changing custom than meets the eye, and it turns out that it dates back to the Heian Period (794-1185), when the Emperor would commemorate the seasons by officially changing his ceremonial kimonos from winter to summer or vice-versa. Of course, J-List sells authentic high school uniforms for guys and girls, including both summer and winter versions of girls' uniforms, which are custom made to your exact size by the famous Matsukameya of Nagoya. If you'd like to own a cool high school uniform of your very own, browse our site now. Yes, there's plenty of time to get your uniform made and shipped to you by Halloween, although it's a good idea to order quickly.

Japanese Convenience Stores And You

You can pick almost any area to compare Japan with the U.S.: history, culture, sports -- or if you like, convenience stores. The modern combini came to Japan in 1974 with the opening of the first Seven-Eleven here, a project which got its start when Japanese businessman Hideo Shimizu took a bus trip across the U.S. looking for the "next big thing" and fell in love with the idea of stores that offered items customers might need to buy on short notice, sold in a uniform way. Now there are dozens of convenience store chains here, including Lawson ("your town's hot station"), Sunkus (the name is a bizarre merging of "sun" and "thanks"), FamilyMart, MiniStop, Heart-In, and Yamazaki Daily Store. While most of the foods sold at U.S. convenience stores are pre-packaged and highly processed, many of the offerings in their Japanese counterparts are downright wholesome, with traditional Japanese-style food (bento and onigiri), Western favorites like cucumber and strawberry sandwiches, bread products including sliced bread as well as specialty items like Curry Pan, a good selection of salads, dozens of types of bottled Asian and Western teas, aloe-flavored yogurt, and so on. Convenience stores are the salvation of the single male since there are enough healthy choices that you can usually eat pretty well there without resorting to that most famous of bachelor foods, instant ramen, although they sell that, too. You won't find the iconic Slurpee or Big Gulp at Seven-Elevens in Japan, but I'd give them up any day in exchange for niku-man, a steamed Chinese bun filled with meat that's great in the Winter. Combini offer other forms of convenience, too, like a full color copier and digital photograph printer, the ability to pay your electric and phone bills at the cash register, shipping services for sending packages, and increasingly, real banking services, including making cash withdrawals and deposits using the smart ATM. That first pilot store back in 1974 has really paid off: Seven-Eleven's parent company Seven&i Holdings purchased its parent company in 2005 and now owns the brand worldwide.

How to Learn Japanese: Intuition

If you want to learn a language as different from English as Japanese is, you'll need a few things. First, you'll need to get past the brain's natural resistance to trying to "read" a language comprised of little snakes wriggling on a page, as Japanese looks to be at first, and the best way to accomplish this is to practice hiragana, katakana and kanji until your brain starts recognizing the characterswithout conscious throught. (It takes less time than you'd think.) You'll need a lot of perseverance, and as wide a range of areas related to the language you can feel passionate about as possible -- this is usually not a problem when it comes to Japan, since there are so many fascinating aspects of the country. Another thing that really helps with foreign languages is what the Japanese call kan, meaning "sense" or "intuition," and if you are kan ga ii (kahn ga EE, having a good sense about things) you'll be able to intuit the meaning someone is trying to communicate even though you might not know the word per se. My son and daughter are both preparing for the Eiken English test in a few weeks, but they're going about studying in different ways. My son, who is very methodical and likes to understand everything about what he's studying, gets hung up on difficult vocabulary, made all the worse by the fact that he's taking a test intended for college-level students yet is only 13. But we're constantly amazed at how often my daughter, a year younger, is able to pull the correct answer out of her head without actually understanding the material she's studying on a conscious level. She's got kan, which helps her sense the meaning most of the time.

I've no idea what this picture is but it rules. Hence I will include it here.

Japanese Office Spaces

In the movie Tron, there's a great scene where you see this sea of cubicles going on forever, an extremely prescient visual for 1982. I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't look at that part of the film and say, "Wow, that'd be a great place to work!" but in Japan, that might not be the case. Japanese offices are nearly always open, with desks lined up in rows or facing each other so that the only privacy workers have at their desks is whatever reference books they can manage to stack around themselves. Before starting J-List I worked in the local City Office as a "Coordinator of Internationalization," helping to provide various services to foreigners in our city, and it was a rather unnerving experience, working in a room where 30+ people had a direct line of sight to me at any moment. Larger organizations use the open floor office model, too. Once I visited one of our distributors (Tohan) and was surprised to see the entire company working in one cavernous space with rows of desks and hundreds of people buzzing about, without so much as a cubicle wall to hang a Dilbert strip on. One interesting aspect of this open approach to workspace-building is that the bosses are in the same space as their employees, although usually with their desks set in a special location so they can oversee the employees attached to them. At least, working in this way adds a layer of transparency and democratization to the company as a whole, even if it wouldn't be much fun to work in.

The Power of Voice in Japan

The Japanese are masters of influencing emotions using voice, and I'm often amazed at the eerie beauty of the voices that enter my ear here. If you watch anime in Japanese, of course, you know how talented the Japanese voice actresses are, and their ability to bring to life a character that would otherwise be (literally) two-dimensional and inert is one of the major attractions of the genre. One of the most popular voice actresses in Japan today is Aya Hirano, who provides the voices for Haruhi Suzumiya, Konata from Lucky Star and Misa from Death Note, and she can do the most amazing things with a character. But the strangely compelling beauty of Japanese voices isn't limited to anime: you can find females who are specially trained to speak in a uniquely soft way in various professions, too, such as female bus guides, who entertain passengers on long sightseeing trips; ground hostesses, those airport employees who call out your flight number in the most delightful sing-song tones; and Japan's legendary elevator girls, the uniformed women who stand in the elevator and announce each floor for you (although they've almost completely disappeared). It's hard to describe the quality of these sweet voices, which are made possible by weeks or months of vocal training -- there's something about the way they dip down and back up again at the end of a sentence that casts a spell over me. But speaking in a cute voice isn't just for a few professions with high customer visibility. I'll never forget the time I called NTT, Japan's sprawling telephone and Internet provider, to get help with some computer hardware I was having problems with. The voice on the other end belonged to an extremely kawaii-sounding female NTT employee, and bastard that I am, I actually expected her to take down my information and then transfer me to some male technician who would tell me how to fix my problem. I was quite surprised when the cute voice quickly proceeded to help me debug my router and fix the TCP/IP problem I'd been having, solving it in no time. I had to hang my head in shame for a while after that.

Understanding Katakana English

I wrote last time that one of the challenges of living in Japan is getting accustomed to Japanese-accented English, sometimes called katakana English because of the way it's filtered through the syllable-based phonetic structure of Japanese. Back in high school, I listened to the old-school Macross song "0-G Love" for more than a year before it it dawned on me that the phrase was English -- the unfamilar pronunciation confused me enough that I wasn't even able to identify it as my own language. Of course, everyone has an accent when speaking another language, including me, and I might have similar challenges understanding the local English whether I was in Japan or China or Jamaica. Part of the probem is, the special nature of Japanese phonology makes words that are a single syllable to us (like "truck") into three when spoken by a Japanese person (torakku, pronounced to-RAH-kkoo). Some other vocal concepts we take for granted need to be remapped into sounds that exist in Japanese, which is why "where" sounds like "oo-eh-AH" and "twins" comes out like "tsoo-EE-nzoo," which can take a while to get used to. Then there are words that are used differently here, even though they're ostensibly English, like VIP and UFO, which are pronounced as "veep" and "you-fo."

Ah, Mari Iijima, you still got it...

Hot Japanese Female Politicians, Lack of Children

Taro Aso is getting down to business as the 92nd Prime Minister of Japan, forming his cabinet quickly after his landslide election. One of his first moves has been to appoint Yuko Obuchi, the 34-year-old daughter of the former Prime Minister who sadly died in office, as a new Special Minister in Charge of Measures Dealing with the Falling Birth Rate. Obuchi, who happens to hail from J-List's home prefecture of Gunma, might be the perfect person to serve as poster child for the issue, since she's got a lot of visibility as a young female lawmaker (following recent political trends, she's quite the hottie), and she has a one-year old baby, too. The problem of shoshika, literally "fewer children-ization" or the increasing dearth of children in Japan, has got a lot of people worried as its effects start to be felt in earnest, and Japan's population is projected to drop from 130 to 100 million by the middle of the century if things don't improve. Already Japanese cities are being forced to close some elementary schools, tearing them down or re-purposing them for use as general municipal buildings. There are many reasons why Japanese women are waiting longer to start having children and are having fewer when they do, with everything from the high cost of raising a child to changing social roles to a general lack of patriotic spirit among Japanese suggested. Prime Minister Aso will likely face more debate on the issue if an election is called in the next few months, as is expected, and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has been floating a plan to pay each household $250 per month for every child they have. Personally, I'd feel better about bringing children into a world where the government is solvent and not wasting its money in silly ideas, but that's just me.
(This is a chart of the Japanese birth rate, going form 4.5 children per female in 1947 to 1.4 today. The dip you see in the middle is the year of Hinouema, the Year of the Fire Horse, 1966. According to superstition, girls born in this year are supposedly very headstrong, and parents avoid having children in this year to avoid having daughters that can't find husbands.)

Announcing the Beginning of Pocky Season

Chocolate Season has Begun! J-List is happy to announce the return of chocolate snacks to our website, now that it's cooled down here. We're busting out all the new flavors of Pocky for the 2008-2009 chocolate season, with an excellent new Crush Pocky in an extra large package and two new flavors of Dessert Pocky, the richest and most delicious stick snack ever. In addition, we've classics like Original Pocky and Men's Pocky back on the site. As usual, you can buy individual boxes or opt for shrinkwrapped cases at a special discount price.

Japan's New Otaku Prime Minister

Japan's next Prime Minister has been decided, and as expected, it's to be Taro Aso, who received more than 95% of the votes by his ruling Liberal Democrat Party. One of the few really interesting Japanese politicians, he worked his way through college at Stanford before his parents called him home to keep him from becoming too "Americanized," so he went to England to complete his studies instead. He mined diamonds in Sierra Leone, represented Japan in the Olympics in 1976 at Clay Pigeon Shooting, and he's quite technically minded, having assembled his own PCs from the motherboard up for the past ten years. When discussing Japanese politicians, the word "thoughorbred" often comes up, and this term applies to Aso-san as well: his father was a former cabinet member, his grandfather a former Prime Minister, and he's the great great grandson of Toshimichi Okubo, one of the most important reformers of the Meiji Restoration of 1868. It's well know that Aso-san is a fan of Japan's manga and anime culture, which has helped him attain popularity among younger Japanese, especially among 2channelers and the English anime-related blogosphere. He supposedly reads three volumes of manga a day, sometimes on the Diet floor, and much of the recent recognition of the importance of Japanese popular culture have come from Aso-san, who has said he would like to create an international "Nobel Prize" for manga. His interest in comics -- for example, he promoted education about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima using the famous manga story Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen) -- has caused the term "Manga Diplomacy" to be coined, and it will be interesting to see how his ability to name all the Lucky Star characters will color his leadership. One of the most refreshing things about Japan is their ability to have elections without contemplating the religion of the candidates in question in the slightest. When I mentioned to my wife that Aso-san happened to be a devout Roman Catholic, a rarity in a Buddhist country like Japan, my wife was surprised to hear it. At no time had the issue even been brought up by the Japanese news media.

This is the picture that "outed" Aso-san as an otaku and won him millions of fans on the Internets. They call him Rozen Aso now.

Wisdom on Living in Japan

When foreigners come to live in Japan, there are certain skills they will need to acquire. When I first arrived in Japan back in 1991, I was surprised to see that almost none of the roads in Japanese cities had names, which made it extremely difficult to learn my way around. I had to get good at visualizing routes inside my brain and learn how to refer to roads in vague terms ("the road with the beauty shop and the convenience store") when asking for directions. Another skill is getting accustomed to the accents of Japanese people you'll be interacting with, which can be quite a challenge, as your brain doesn't immediately understand that someone asking for uu-OH-tah wants a glass of water. When speaking Japanese with people, you'll need to get good at identifying the subjects of sentences since they're often left off when the meaning is otherwise clear from the context, or at least faking understanding in certain situations, such as the time I was picked to stand up and conduct the Maebashi Philharmonic playing Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. Afterwards, the MC asked me something that I didn't catch, and rather than embarrass myself on the stage with hundreds of people watching me, I replied with the non sequitur so desu ne, which should mean "yes, that's so" but in effect doesn't mean anything.

Speed Racer Service Centers

Would you get your car serviced at a Speed Racer Service Center? I sure would. It's an interesting gimmick by entrepreneur and former Super GT race driver Tetsuji Tamanaka, who licensed the characters from Tatsunoko Production's venerable "Mach GoGoGo" to create a chain of Speed Racer-branded service centers, gas stations and used-car dealerships designed to bring a well-known face to the "total carlife support" they offer their customers. The familiarity of the character Go Mifune (as Speed is called in Japanese) combined with the current income level of the generation that grew up watching the original show has proven to be a big win for the company, which is opening franchise shops throughout Japan that do everything from buying used cars for sale through its national network to auto painting and that annoying sha-ken car inspection that drivers of older cars must pay $1500 for every two years. This isn't the only company that ties anime to car culture: there's also a chain of car repair shops that uses the famous Space Battleship Yamato logo and characters to promote themselves. These businesses are somewhat unique though: while anime is enjoyed by literally everyone at some point in their lives here, it's not usually something you see while driving down Main Street very often. Like Cowboy Bebop and Akira, Mach GoGoGo is one of those shows that became far more popular internationally than it ever was inside of Japan, and I for one am glad to see that Speed Racer hasn't been forgotten in the country of his birth.

Of course, they also have their own sexy Race Queens:

Trying to Get Into the BBC

I got a good laugh the other day while watching an episode of Comedy Central's The Daily Show. During the "Moments of Zen" compilation of coverage of the two political conventions, British comedian John Oliver tried to walk into the BBC's preparation room, despite not having an official pass. "I'm British," he said, with his proper accent, "and you don't need a credential to be British. My voice is my credential." It was extra amusing to me because I'd done a very similar thing in Japan. A decade or so ago, they held an international speed-skating competition in my prefecture, so I decided to go check it out. As I went to find my seats in the bleachers, I happened to notice a door for coaches and other VIPs, most of whom were from the U.S. or Europe, and on a hunch I wondered if I could get into that room just by being American. The Japanese person watching the door didn't want to let me in at first, but the right mixture of appearing to be in a hurry and speaking English at him rapidly got the job done, and I got to enjoy the skating competition while helping myself to beers and munchies. It wasn't very nice of me, of course, but it was an experiment I felt had to be made at the time.

(The BBC bit starts around 3:10 or so)

Wacky English T-Shirts!

During the Sports Festival, I engaged in a little hobby of mine: hunting for bizarre English T-shirts. For some reason, the parents who attend these sporting events often choose to wear T-shirts with the most interesting English phrases on them, so every year I walk around with my camera and see what I can see. My search got off on the right foot when I came across a young woman whose shirt said, "Gluttons: Smile Positive and Good Heart," followed by a man whose shirt proclaimed "Make Up Foundation For This World." Some of the slogans I saw seemed quite deep ("Music: Make a Recording, Life 83% Full"), while others were more perplexing ("Sense of Pitch 1962, Rosegirl"). Sometimes the messages were silly ("You're my Hearo [sic], Fashion Icon!!") while others tried to offer insight into that elusive concept of "freedom" which Japanese often associate with the USA ("Liberty Bell is Prime Wish -- I Love Me"). Of course, no one gives a second thought about what their T-shirts have printed on them in Japan, since for most people, English is primarily a decoration that's considered kakko ii (cool) and not something actually used for communication, which is why there's no problem with displaying a message like, "Definite Difference: That Oneself Cannot Be Ruled Is Not Free." Of course, we've been known to sell a wacky T-shirt or two here at J-List, but in Japanese rather than English. If you like the idea of having a wacky shirt with aesthetically beautiful kanji that no one around you can read, why not browse our lineup now?

Here are some of the pictures I took:

Autumn in Japan: School Sports Festivals!

Autumn is upon us, and in Japan that means one thing: School Sports Festival, a special event held at all elementary schools where kids run relays, do tug-of war, have egg toss competitions, perform dances that they've been practicing for months, and so on. Known as undo-kai in Japanese, pronounced "OON-doh-kai" and having nothing to do with the undo feature on your computer, the Japanese tradition of a special day when kids can show off their athletic abilities to their parents began in 1874 when an English teacher named Frederick William Strange organized the first "outdoor games" as a way for Japanese to learn about Western sports. Today, Sports Festivals are held across Japan, which turns out to be quite profitable for companies like Panasonic and Sony, who are all too happy to sell this year's hot new video cameras to all the oya-baka ("parent-fool"), the word for parents who go ga-ga filming their own kids. Saturday was my daughter's last Sports Festival of elementary school, and we dutifully gathered to cheer her on during the various events she was in. It's an annual tradition at the school that the sixth graders treat everyone to a brass band performance of the theme to Space Battleship Yamato, aka Star Blazers, and everyone did a great job.